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If you order your computer online, you can specify that it be loaded with Windows7. We order PCs from HP, and they call it 'Windows7 downgrade' or 'WinXP downgrade'. PC manufacturers realize that a lot of business applications aren't Win8 compatible, and keep the older operating systems available. Those PCs also come with a Win8 'upgrade' disk, so you can load 8 in the future.Windows 8 sucks if you don't have a touch screen or touch mouse, it seems to ge more geared towards the tablet/phone environment. I've had to setup PCs that my customers went out and bought themselves, Win8 just gets in the way if you only have an old-fashioned mouse & keyboard.If you have Win8, and can't stand the interface, you can try using a 'classic shell', which makes it work more like old Windows...

What makes Windows 8 even more of a failure is lack of native apps. How long has Win8 been out.... and they _still_ don't have a good library of apps for it. I pretty much stay stay in the Desktop (i.e. Win7) 99.9% of the time.

The thing that is really insulting is many of the "free" apps in the Win8 store are just links to the developers site where you can pay for the Win7 software.

yeah..that is the problem for me...i have two android tablets that i use constantly...and the GUI for windows 8 is definitely a tablet/touchscreen design and so trying to use it on a laptop is frustrating as all get out......plus all of the weirdly forced windows things too....(how those apps work etc).....urgh...we had to get a new laptop in a very short time frame (hours) so the ability of working to get a win 7 was not possible.......

Oh man, this is a volatile subject for me, as I am slowly being shoved toward Win8 because of my aging computer.

I loved XP. I had all the programs I needed/wanted and they ran great until a hardrive crash & I hurried to get a new machine with Vista. Hadn't had time to reseach it first. Imagine my shock to find out that 85% of my programs couldn't be installed anymore. Gads, it was a devastating experience and I don't think I've gotten over it yet. Quark is the only program that made a transition without a whimper. I lost all of my Adobe programs- had to spring for Photoshop which was a huge expense for me. Lost Excel and Access, not to mention Word, which drives me nuts but you have to have from time to time.

Okay, so now I am faced with this happening all over again. I don't trust this transition, can't afford the expense in time, let alone money.

Classic interface? That's what they said about the transition to Vista, except they kept it an egg hunt to figure out how to make it happen. I have to have the Classic. All my muscle memory is tied to it and am not too willing to put the time and effort into something they're just going to change again in a couple of years.

Windows 7 cleaned up a lot of stuff and still suffered from the "let's move features to new places where users will never think to find them" syndrome of each new iteration of windows. However they still got a lot of things right and the system, while not perfect, went a long way to making Windows "self-tuning/self-optimizing."

Windows 8 is an absolute blight on mankind. They mashed two paradigms (desktop/tablet) together and both aspects suffered for it. Waaaaay too much of the OS is geared to hard-selling you missing features. It's the equivalent of a car made with a gearbox made by cavemen or if it were a movie, it would have been Highlander II: The Quickening.

A desktop is not a tablet.

This is the same stupidity prevalent among car makers... a car is not a tablet.

Cars had distinct buttons so that you could operate them without taking your eye off the road.... idjits!!!

Car makers should be held liable for every accident that's caused by some driver with his/her eyes glued to the soft controls of their car's media/climate/etc. controls.

Windows 8 adoption among corporate customers is abyssmal.... Microsoft should take a hint.

Tom: What camera do you have? Have you connected to the PC with a cable? It should install the software for the camera and the storage on the camera should appear as another drive that you can copy the image files from.

You can download one of the freeware image programs (believe Xnview still works under Windows 8 under the desktop shell, not the Metro interface). As far as uploading, where are you uploading too and how were you trying to upload?

Well yeah... but they were familiar warts and in the grand scheme of things, it just plain worked.

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Windows Vista was a little bit of make-up on an ugly duckling.

Vista sucks. Permissions scheme alone were enough to hate it.

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Windows 7 cleaned up a lot of stuff and still suffered from the "let's move features to new places where users will never think to find them" syndrome of each new iteration of windows. However they still got a lot of things right and the system, while not perfect, went a long way to making Windows "self-tuning/self-optimizing."

I had one computer with Win7 and hated it also. Still couldn't install programs and it was chock full of glitchies.

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Windows 8 is an absolute blight on mankind. They mashed two paradigms (desktop/tablet) together and both aspects suffered for it. Waaaaay too much of the OS is geared to hard-selling you missing features. It's the equivalent of a car made with a gearbox made by cavemen or if it were a movie, it would have been Highlander II: The Quickening.

[/list] [/quote]Oy.

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Cars had distinct buttons so that you could operate them without taking your eye off the road.... idjits!!!

Car makers should be held liable for every accident that's caused by some driver with his/her eyes glued to the soft controls of their car's media/climate/etc. controls.

I will never forget the time I made a left turn onto an intersection, to find a police car stopped in the middle of it. I stopped behind him, thinking something was up- thought he was going to get out to direct traffic or something. I waited and waited.... didn't dare go around him, right? Long time later I began to wonder if he was hurt. Got out and approached the car..... turned out he was really into his onboard keyboard computer-thing and got a tad sidetracked.

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